Pratyush: India’s fastest supercomputer unveiled

India’s fastest and first multi-petaflops (PF) supercomputer named Pratyush was unveiled at Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM). The supercomputer has been named as ‘Pratyush’ meaning Sun.

It will help India with better forecasts in terms of monsoon, extreme events, cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes, air quality, lightning, fishing, hot and cold waves, flood and drought among others.

Key Facts

Supercomputer Pratyush will be national facility for improving weather and climate forecasts and services under umbrella of the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES). Pratyush has 6.8 PF computational power installed at two MoES Institutes. 4.0 Peta Flops HPC facility at IITM, Pune and 2.8 Peta Flops facility at NCMRWF, Noida. (PF is a measure of a computer’s processing speed).

Pratyush is fourth fastest supercomputer in world dedicated for weather and climate research. It follows supercomputing machines in Japan, US and United Kingdom. It will improve rankings of Indian supercomputer from 300s to 30s in Top500 list, a respected international tracker of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

The key function of the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility will be monsoon forecasting using dynamical model which requires simulating weather for given month and letting custom-built model calculate impact of actual weather over coming months. It will enable to map regions in India at resolution of 3 km and globe at 12 km.